Repository files navigation

https://namecoin.org

Namecoin is a decentralized open source information registration and transfer system based on the Bitcoin cryptocurrency.

• Securely record and transfer arbitrary names (keys).
• Attach a value (data) to the names (up to 520 bytes, more in the future).
• Transact namecoins, the digital currency (ℕ, NMC).

Namecoin was the first fork of Bitcoin and still is one of the most innovative altcoins. It was first to implement merged mining and a decentralized DNS. Namecoin squares Zooko's Triangle!

• Protect free-speech rights online by making the web more resistant to censorship.
• Access websites using the .bit domain (with TLS/SSL).
• Store identity information such as email, GPG key, BTC address, TLS fingerprints, Bitmessage address, etc.
• Human readable Tor .onion names/domains.
• File signatures, Voting, bonds/stocks,/shares, web of trust, escrow and notary services (to be implemented).

For more information, as well as an immediately useable, binary version ofthe Namecoin Core software, seehttps://www.namecoin.org/download.

Namecoin Core is released under the terms of the MIT license. SeeCOPYING for moreinformation or seehttps://opensource.org/licenses/MIT.

Themaster branch is regularly built (see doc/build-*.md for instructions) and tested, but is not guaranteed to becompletely stable.Tags are createdregularly to indicate new official, stable release versions of Namecoin Core.

The contribution workflow is described inCONTRIBUTING.mdand useful hints for developers can be found indoc/developer-notes.md.

The developerforumshould be used to discuss complicated or controversial changes before workingon a patch set.

Developer IRC can be found on Freenode at #namecoin-dev.

Testing and code review is the bottleneck for development; we get more pullrequests than we can review and test on short notice. Please be patient and help out by testingother people's pull requests, and remember this is a security-critical project where any mistake might cost peoplelots of money.

Developers are strongly encouraged to writeunit tests for new code, and tosubmit new unit tests for old code. Unit tests can be compiled and run(assuming they weren't disabled during the generation of the build system) with:ctest. Further details on runningand extending unit tests can be found in/src/test/README.md.

There are alsoregression and integration tests, writtenin Python.These tests can be run (if thetest dependencies are installed) with:build/test/functional/test_runner.py(assumingbuild is your build directory).

The CI (Continuous Integration) systems make sure that every pull request is built for Windows, Linux, and macOS,and that unit/sanity tests are run automatically.

Changes should be tested by somebody other than the developer who wrote thecode. This is especially important for large or high-risk changes. It is usefulto add a test plan to the pull request description if testing the changes isnot straightforward.

Translation workflow is not yet set up for Namecoin Core. For strings which are common to Bitcoin Core, see below.

Changes to translations as well as new translations can be submitted toBitcoin Core's Transifex page.

Translations are periodically pulled from Transifex and merged into the git repository. See thetranslation process for details on how this works.

Important: We do not accept translation changes as GitHub pull requests because the nextpull from Transifex would automatically overwrite them again.